Well I have my Ascended Forge Victory. .07% of players have earned it, according to Steam.
This took me much longer to figure out than my first Minor Forge Victory, and honestly, caused me way more heartburn. I love this game but below I'm going to do some griping.
The essence of Cultist Simulator is figuring things out. Has been with all of Alexis' games at the end of the day. Read the lore, assemble the pieces, figure out where you need to go and do what you need to do.
What makes Cultist Simulator different from his other games, and kinda frustrating, is the the COST of ignorance.
CS wants you to try stuff out. That's cool. To get a Minor Victory, you have to read the lore, understand what's being asked for, put the right things in the right place and win.
For an Ascended Victory though, there's so much more you need to figure out. Depending on what you've seen in previous games, some of the esoteric requests may make more sense. But for me, everything was very ambiguous starting out. You're asked to do things with oblique references to them, and by reading and experimenting and playing basically 95% of the available game, you'll get half way there. So an Ascended Victory is like a Minor Victory in that regard, except there's more to figure out AND many of the pieces you need to win don't reveal themselves until very, very late in the game (I suppose according to RNG). So it's different than a Minor Victory in that you will spend a TON of time twisting in the wind wondering, have I missed something? Is there still something yet I haven't seen that will explain things? That made an Ascended Victory feel more laborious and frustrating as you tediously grind through what areas of the game remain to you, all while tiresomely handling Notoriety. It almost made me pine for the excitement of having a Long opposing you.
So there's that.
But then there's two other isuses that makes pursuing an Ascended Victory a pain in the ass, and why I probably would have never done it without save scumming.
Bad Information and Limited Attempts coupled with Ignorance about what is going to happen.
I'll explain the latter first. In order to get an Ascended Victory, you will have to consume precious materials that ultimately cannot be replaced. Unless you're playing Cult of the Hydra, getting an AV requires you to sacrifice an Exalted Cult member. No big deal right? Plenty of those......a whole two to three assuming nothing else went wrong up to that point. What makes this suck is that, after you sacrifice them, you only have a limited amount of time to make good on their sacrifice before it expires. Something you wouldn't know, CAN'T KNOW, until you've done it. You might make the sacrifice 30 hours before you're actually ready to do the final ritual. You might make the sacrifice and then get dicked over by timers. Just to know the answer, in a game where you're not save scumming, you have to put yourself that much closer to losing.
This ignorance of what the rules are is why legitimately achieving an AV probably takes a minimum of two playthroughs. Your first playthrough is just learning the rules and fucking up the rather obscure ritual with several possibly intentional failure points built in. Your second is for doing it right. For example: there's a ritual in the Forge Ascended Victory that powers up an item, so it can be used in the final ritual. But you can set up the item to be powered up as though it were in the final ritual configuration, and end up consuming some stuff you needed for the final ritual. Due to the way rituals are really generic and so is the text telling you what's going to happen, you can in essence jump the shark by accident, simply because you don't know.
And then there's the second bit: Bad Information. Cultist Simulator emulates doing research, being a scholar. At one point, there is a part of the final ritual that requires a Follower to do a thing. For the entire game up until this point, the Follower has been flagged as part of the final ritual, once you figure out that bit. This is a part I legitimately feel bad about because I ended up spoiling this part of it for myself in my confusion and fear I'd screwed something up. (Because the game had shown me several times it's possible to do that.) On trying to create the final ritual I realized there was another step involving this follower I'd missed. A VERY careful reading of the aspects on the Follower and the directions you're given at the start of an Ascended playthrough make it clearer that there's something else you need to do. So I go "Ok, there's a Cultist Simulator scholar problem here, I need to reference all the stuff I've read before to figure out what to do. Cool." But since none of the stuff I've read before playing the game is available in game anywhere, I go to the internet. The "Key" to the problem implies, due to its very text, the involvement of a card you've already played and processed long, long ago. I realize this, and start googling around the phrase, busting my brain trying to think what the METHOD is supposed to be. And then I click on a link and have the answer spoiled for me outright. And it turns out.....the answer does not even come close to jiving with the clues you were given.
"Find the flaw in the world at the place that always has the same name in every History." Ok, I remembered that card, it was a Location card referencing Vienna, the White City. The card's text explicitly says that phrase. But those location cards are one and done. So how I can go back there? Turns out, you don't. The actual location is one of the lower level repeatable location cards, whose texts has no reference or link I can see to "the city with the same name in every history." Once I was spoiled on what the location was, I was spoiled on the fact you need to SEND THE COMPASS there. Honestly if I'd read the Compass aspects closer, I might have figured it out eventually. But after hours and hours and hours of puzzling over the many obscure phrases in the Ascended Victory texts, and trying several different weird and obscure things to satisfy them, I was pretty much burnt out. I feel bad that I spoiled this part of it for myself, but who knows how many more hours I would have fucked around with it.
And after completing the objective on that card, it just boldly declares of fucking nothing "This is the city that has the same name in every History." Oh really? According to fucking what! According to the ACTUAL LORE in the game, that city is Vienna, not this random shit hole.
To to recap:
-Hella obscure instructions, which for CS, is expected.
-Hella ambiguous ways things could be accomplished. Turns out, it almost all revolves around rituals, specific ones you'll get at random as you playthrough literally the entire game.
-Limited Resources, that you have to consume just to know you've done something incorrectly.
-Bait and switches where you don't know you're consuming something, or that some action now needs to be taken within a specific time frame, until AFTER you've enacted it.
-Timer shenanigans. Several parts of an Ascended Victory revolve around time limited stuff.
All in all I'm glad I got my Ascended Victory but man it was a slog to get there, and I spent a lot of time trying stuff out and pulling my hair out thinking I was missing something, and the one thing I truly WAS missing, I ended up spoiling for myself because of inconsistent lore and generally just being burnt out on trying stuff.
TLDR: If you're going for an Ascended Victory, prepare for Long Hours.
Author
Topic: Cultist Simulator: Behold Our End (Kickstarter by creator of Sunless Sea) (Read 35165 times)